Sitting there in the dark must have been like that situation where you're waiting for someone, and they're so late you figure they'll never show, but you're afraid to leave because they might show up any second, but you have to leave sometime, but you don't want to miss them when they eventually show up.

A joint statement from Entergy New Orleans, which provides power to the stadium, and Superdome operator SMG shed some light on the chain of events, which apparently started at the spot where Entergy feeds power into the stadium's lines. The problem occurred shortly after Beyonce put on a halftime show that featured extravagant lighting and video effects.

"A piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system," the statement said. "Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue. ... Entergy and SMG will continue to investigate the root cause of the abnormality."

One of the "features" of a green environment is an attempt to eliminate overcapacity in the powergrid. The result is that changes in demand can ripple through the system and affect large consumers of power like the Superdome. The lack of capacity to handle peaks is expensive to maintain and typically handled by coal and gas plants that can be brought on-line quickly. The more we go green, the fewer of these we have.

We can see the effects of the inability to increase supply in the preference for households over businesses. Businesses can be impacted disproportionately and their internal circuits can shut down due to lack of available power.

It's interesting how this happened just after half-time - there can be any number of reasons why a whole lot of households started consuming power very differently. Maybe a lot of appliances fired up at the same time, maybe all those large-screen TVs were shut off during halftime, but came back on when play began.

It's interesting how this happened just after half-time - there can be any number of reasons why a whole lot of households started consuming power very differently. Maybe a lot of appliances fired up at the same time, maybe all those large-screen TVs were shut off during halftime, but came back on when play began.

It seemed like everyone kept their cool, though. From the TV images it actually looked like there was still plenty of light. Even enough to resume play, if they'd been unable to turn them back on.

"Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue."

So it's a safety system that's designed to simply turn off power to large portions of a crowded stadium. That's a pretty stupid design. At very least the emergency lighting should be on a separate circuit.

I suspect there was a drop in current levels to the Superdome about the time the second half started and circuits shut down at the stadium to balance power usage with power availability. The real question is why power supplied to the stadium dropped. The half-time show would have only increased demand on power by the stadium. As the half-time show went on successfully, there didn't seem to be a lack of power then.

Again, this could be blamed on an overly aggressive effort to fine-tune performance on the grid and that behavior elsewhere in the system drained power and made less available to the stadium just about when the second half got under way. Considering that current flows through the system like water and cause and effect can be delayed by several minutes.

Again, I'm thinking there are elements of "green" policy that may be related to making the powergrid less able to respond to changes in demand.

Fortunately, we had already saved up about 40 minutes of time on our DVR, so we could skip through the half time show and NOT have to watch Beyonce. The power outage was over for us in about 2 minutes.

I was amazed. They can't play football without their electronic equipment. My God....how did they ever do it in the past.

Maguro ...so Christie popped his head up from fellating Obamessiah, eh?

Me, personally, myself and I, who watches only one game in entirety per year, watched the game delay in abject horror. I was terrified they'd repeat the half time howl-o-rama with bubble ass dancers who think their crotch is their sole strong point.